The present invention relates to stereoscopic display method and apparatus for calculating a phase distribution from 3-dimensional information of an object and performing a holographic stereoscopic display and, more particularly, to stereoscopic display method and apparatus for expressing an object as a display target by sampling points, thereby calculating a phase distribution.
In case of obtaining phase information to display a hologram from the 3-dimensional information of an object by a computer, a very large amount of information must be handled, so that it is hitherto demanded to reduce a calculation amount.
Conventionally, in computer processes of phase information to display a hologram from the 3-dimensional information of an object, as shown in FIG. 1, an object or space, which is specified by 3-dimensional information and is displayed, is divided in a lattice shape at regular intervals and sampling points shown by dots are set at regular intervals. A phase distribution is calculated for every microarea of the hologram plane which expresses the phase distribution while using a set of sampling points as a display target. In this case, by setting the interval between sampling points to a limit of the resolution of the human eyes, a solid image can be displayed without deteriorating picture quality.
When the interval between sampling points of the object which are used in the phase calculation is uniformly set to the resolution limit of the human eyes, however, the number of sampling points is extremely large. Processes for calculating the phase distribution for every sampling point and adding the calculated phase distributions with respect to all of the sampling points must be repeated for every microarea of all of the hologram planes. There is consequently a problem such that the amount of calculations to obtain the phase information is extremely large and it takes a long time to calculate the phase information. To reduce the amount of calculations for the phase information, a method of uniformly reducing the number of sampling points is also considered. However, this causes a problem in that the picture quality deteriorates. The resolution of the human eyes, on the other hand, varies depending on the conditions such as observation distance, nature of the image, and the like. The use of the method of uniformly setting the interval between sampling points on the basis of the highest resolution merely results in an increase in the amount of calculation, for the phase information than it is needed, so that such a method is not always preferable.